Mashed Potatoes

By a chain of circumstances too trivial to bother rehearsing now, I found myself in the dining room of the Auberge de l’Ill in Alsace with my two-year-old son Michael in the spring of 1967, on the very day that the restaurant received its third Michelin star. I hadn’t intended to bring Michael along, but when Chef Haeberlin heard that he’d been left with his mother in the hotel, he insisted that I go get them.

But what did he intend